I’m damned if I do, thought Ridley. Mr Shillito loved to watch people reading what he had written, and as he did so he would smile, grunt appreciatively, nod and in other ways indicate enjoyment and admiration until all but the strongest were forced by a kind of spiritual pressure to follow his lead. In his way, the old fellow was a bully; he was so keen in his appreciation of himself and his work that not to join him became a form of discourtesy.
“I am rather busy, at present,” said Ridley. “I’ll read them later.”
“Ah, you don’t have to tell me how busy you are,” said Mr Shillito; “I know, perhaps better than anyone, what the pressure is in your job. But if I may I’ll drop in again later in the morning, when you’ve had time to read those. I’ve noticed that a few of my things haven’t appeared in print yet, though you’ve had them in hand for a fortnight or more. Now, Chief, you know me. I’m the oldest man on the staff, perhaps the oldest working journalist in the country. If there’s any falling-off, any hint of weariness in my stuff, you’ve only to tell me. I know I’m not immortal. The old clock must run down some day, though I must say I feel in wonderful form at present. But be frank. Am I getting too old for my job?”
Oh God, thought Ridley, he’s beating me to it! He’s making me say it the meanest, dirtiest way. He’s putting me in the position of the Cruel Boss who throws the Faithful Old Employee into the street! I must seize the helm of this conversation from Mr Shillito’s skilled hand or all will be lost.
“You mustn’t think in those terms, Mr Shillito,” he said. “Your work seems to me to be on the same level as always. But it is not my wish or that of the publisher to rob you of the ease to which your seniority entitles you, and in the course of a few days I want to have a talk with you about the future. Meanwhile, I have some pressing matters to attend to, and if you will excuse me—”
“Of course, of course,” said Mr Shillito, in a voice which suggested movement, though he remained firmly in his chair. “But you understand how matters are with me. I don’t wish to be sentimental. Indeed, you know that any display of feeling is repugnant to me. An Englishman, and what I suppose must now be called an Englishman of the Old School, I will submit to anything rather than make a display of my feelings. But you know, Chief, that the Newspaper Game is all in all to me. When the Game becomes too rough for me, I don’t want to watch it from the sidelines. If I have a wish, it’s that I may drop in harness. I’m not a conventionally religious man; my creed, so far as I’ve had one, has been simple Decency. But I’ve prayed to whatever gods there be, many and many a time, “Let me drop in harness; let the old blade wear out, but not rust out!”“
Mr Shillito delivered this prayer in a voice which must have been audible in the news room, even though the presses had begun the morning’s run, and Ridley was sweating with embarrassment. This was becoming worse and worse. To his immense relief, Miss Green came in.
“An important long-distance call, if you can take it, Mr Ridley,” said she.
“Aha!” he cried. “You’ll excuse me, Mr Shillito? Confidential.” He hissed the last word, as though matters on the highest government level were involved. The lover of the Newspaper Game raised his great eyebrows conspiratorially, and tip-toed from the room.
“What is it, Miss Green?” asked Ridley, mopping his bald brow.
“Nothing, really, Mr Ridley,” said Miss Green. “I just thought you might like a change of atmosphere. There was a call a few minutes ago. Professor Vambrace wants to see you at eleven.”
“What about?”
“Wouldn’t say, but he was rather abrupt on the line. He said he had called earlier.”
“Professor Vambrace is always abrupt,” said Ridley. “Thank you, Miss Green. And I am always busy if Mr Shillito wants to see me, for the next few days.”
Miss Green nodded. She was too good a secretary to do more, but there was that in her nod which promised that even the gate-crashing talents of Mr Shillito would be unavailing against her in future.
Sighing, Ridley turned to his next task, which was a consideration of the editorial pages of thirty-eight contemporaries of The Bellman, which had been cut out and stacked ready to hand. He would have liked to take ten minutes to think about Mr Swithin Shillito and the problem which he presented, but he had not ten minutes to spare. People who form their opinions of what goes on in a daily newspaper office upon what they see at the movies imagine that the life of a journalist is one of exciting and unforeseen events; but as Ridley intended to say in his Wadsworth lecture, it was rooted deep in a stern routine; let the heavens fall and the earth consume in flames, the presses must not be late; if the reading public was to enjoy the riotous excess of the world’s news, the newspaperman must bend that excess to the demands of a mechanical routine and a staff of union workers. Before one o’clock he must read all that lay on his desk, talk to the news editor, plan and write at least one leading article, and see any visitors who could win past Miss Green. He could spare no ten minutes for pondering about Mr Shillito. He must read, read, dig, dig, and plan, plan as the Old Mess himself advised.
Upon the right-hand drawboard of his desk was his typewriter; he slipped a piece of paper under the roller and typed a heading: Notes and Comment. It was an ancient custom of the paper to end the editorial columns with a few paragraphs of brief observation, pithy and, if possible, amusing, and Ridley wrote most of them. It was not that he fancied himself as a wit, but the job must be done by somebody, and better his wit than Shillito’s; the Old Mess had a turn for puns and what he called “witty aperçus”. He picked up the first of the editorial pages, and ran his eye quickly over it: a leader complaining of high taxation, and two subsidiary editorials, one sharply rebuking a South American republic for some wickedness connected with coffee and another explaining that the great cause of traffic accidents was not drunkenness or mechanical defects in cars, but elementary bad manners on the part of drivers. There were no paragraphs which he might steal, or use as priming for the pump of his own wit, and only one joke. It read:
WAS LIKE HIM
Office Boy: Man waiting to see you, sir.
Boss: I’m too busy for time-wasters. Does he look important?
Office Boy: Well, not too much so, sir. About like yourself.
Ridley sighed, and put the sheet in the waste basket. The next three yielded nothing that he could use. The fourth contained a note which looked promising. It was:
An American doctor says that hairs in the ears help hearing. Barber, hold those shears!
Surely a witty aperçu could be wrought from that? He pondered for a moment, and then typed:
A Montreal physician asserts that hairs in the ears are aids to hearing. In future, it appears, we must choose between hearing and shearing.
When it was on paper he eyed it glumly, changed “asserts” to “says” and picked up the next sheet. It was from a prairie paper, whose editor was of the opinion that the chief cause of motor accidents was faulty brakes. None of its notes were worth stealing, but tucked in a corner was:
ONE FOR THE BOSS
Boss: You say there is a man at the door wishes to see me. Does he look like a gentleman?
Office Boy: Well, not exactly like a gentleman, sir. Just something like yourself!
The next three papers brought him no inspiration, but among the Notes in the fourth appeared the following:
A local merchant is still reeling from the answer he received when he asked his secretary to describe a visitor. “Nobody important,” replied the fair one, “pretty much like yourself.”
Ridley hurried on. The next page which came to hand carried a sharp warning to the Government that continued high taxation would beget a dreadful vengeance at the next general election, and a lesser piece which said that modern children would be less prone to delinquency if they read fewer comic books devoted to the doings of criminals and fixed their admiration upon some notable hero of the past, such as Robin Hood. This paper also carried an editorial which took issue with s
ome opinions The Bellman had expressed a few days before, on prison reform; the editor of The Bellman, it was implied, lacked a kind and understanding heart. Ridley made a note to write a counterblast, pointing out that Robin Hood was a criminal and a practical communist, and that no one but a numbskull would hold him up as a hero to children.
Thus he worked through the pile of contemporary opinion. He paused to read what a medical columnist in one paper had to say about gallstones. They could, it appeared, “sleep” for years, causing little or no distress beyond an occasional sense of uneasiness. Ridley wondered if he had sleeping gallstones; he certainly had a sense of uneasiness, though it was nothing to what it had been a few years ago. To sit in an editor’s chair, even reading epidemic jokes and groping for witty aperçus, was a good life; better, certainly, than his days as a reporter and, later, as a news editor. He read on, plunging deep into the pool of Canadian editorial opinion: the wickedness of the Government, the wickedness of the nation in spending several times as much on liquor as it gave to charity, the wickedness of the USA in not sufficiently recognizing Canada’s greatness, the wickedness of Britain in not spending more money in Canada: he scanned these familiar topics without emotion, thinking only that the newspapers, like the churches, would be in a poor way if there were no wickedness in the world. Indeed, a good many editors seemed to think of themselves, primarily, as preachers, crying aloud to a godless world to repent of its manifold sins. Some, who did not regard themselves as preachers, appeared to think of themselves as simple, shrewd old farmers; they wrote nostalgically of a bygone, Arcadian era, when everybody was near enough to the farm to have a little manure on his boots, and they appeared to think that farmers were, as a class, more honest and less given to gaudy vice than city folk. Ridley, who had lived in a rural community for a few years when a child, had never been able to find out where this opinion had its root. Other editors, who were disguised neither as preachers nor farmers, donned newsprint togas and appeared as modern Catos, ready to shed the last drop of their ink in defence of those virtues which they believed to be the exclusive property of the party not in power; these were also exceedingly hard upon the rising generation, whom they lumped together under the name of “teen-agers”. To be an editor was to be a geyser of opinion; every day, without fail, Old Faithful must shoot up his jet of comment, neither so provocative as to drive subscribers from his paper, nor yet so inane as to be utterly contemptible. The editor must not affront the intelligence of the better sort among his readers, and yet he must try to say something acceptable to those who really took the paper for the comics and the daily astrology feature. Truly, a barber’s chair, that fits all buttocks.
While musing, Ridley had drawn moustaches and spectacles on pictures of four statesmen which appeared in a paper under his hand. He sketched a wig of curly hair on a bald man. With two deft dots of his pencil, he crossed the eyes of a huge-breasted girl under whose picture appeared the caption: “Miss Sweater Girl for this month is lovely Dinah Ball, acclaimed by outstanding artists for her outstanding physique”. If a new Sweater Girl every month, why not an Udders Day, for the suitable honouring of all mammals? Could a witty aperçu be made of that? Probably not for a family journal.
But this was idleness. He must work. The editor of an evening daily has no time for profitless musing until after three o’clock. He tore up the defaced pictures, so that Miss Green should not find them, and turned once again to his task.
When another twenty minutes had passed he had perused the editorial outpourings of his thirty-eight contemporaries and had produced four more paragraphs of Notes and Comment. It was possible, he knew, to buy syndicated material of this sort, but he rather liked writing his own; the technique had its special fascination. It was possible, when desperate for material, to make an editorial note about virtually anything, or out of nothing at all. Consider, for instance, his startling success of the previous June: a mosquito in his office had annoyed him, and when he mentioned it to Miss Green she borrowed an atomizer filled with some sort of spray from the janitor, sought out the monster, and stifled it. “There’s a spray for every kind of bug now, Mr Ridley,” she had said. “Except the humbug, Miss Green,” he had replied, thinking of Mr Shillito. And there had been a Note, ready to hand. He had typed it at once:
An eminent scientist asserts that there is now a spray for the control of every form of bug. Excluding, of course, the humbug.
One always attributed any foolish remark upon which one intended to pun either to an eminent scientist, a prominent physician, or a political commentator; it gave authenticity and flourish to the witty aperçu which followed. This gem, so quickly conceived and executed, had been copied by eighteen other newspapers, with appropriate credit to The Bellman, stolen by several more, and had appeared a month afterward in the magazine section of the New York Times, attributed to the late Will Rogers.
It was now time for him to settle down to work on the leader for the day, his editorial on the St Lawrence seaway. This was a nervous moment, for he hated to make a beginning at any piece of writing. As the Old Mess had told him, it was already written in his head, but what is written in the head is always so much more cogent and firmly expressed than what at last appears upon the page. He longed for a discretion, something that would postpone beginning for a few more minutes. His wish was gratified; Miss Green came in, carrying three books.
“Shall I put these with the other review books, Mr Ridley?”
“No, let’s have a look at them, Miss Green.”
Books for review always gave him a moment of excitement. There was the chance, faint, but still possible, that among them there would be something which he himself would like to read. But not this time. The first was a volume of pious reflections by a well-known Canadian divine; just the thing for Shillito. Next was a slim volume of verse by a Canadian poetess. Why are such volumes always “slim”, he wondered; why not “scrawny”, which would be so much nearer the truth? Miss Green could polish off the poetess. Next—ah, yes, the choice of an American book club, a volume somewhat larger and heavier than a brick, with a startling jacket printed upon paper so slick as to be somewhat sticky to the touch. Plonk was its title, and the inside flap of the jacket declared that “it lays bare the soul of a man and woman caught up in the maelstrom of modern metropolitan life. Rusty Maloney fights his way from Boston’s Irishtown to success as an advertising executive, only to fall under the spell of Siva McNulty, lovely, alluring but already addicted to Plonk, the insidious mixture of stout, brandy and coarse-ground poppyheads which brings surcease to screaming nerves and abraded passions. An Odyssey of the spirit on a scale rarely attempted, this novel is redolent of…” No use giving that to Shillito; his usual reviewer of novels which were redolent of something was in hospital, having a baby, and he did not want the Old Mess being offensively moral through four inches in the review column. Who, then? Ah, Rumball!
He rang the bell and asked Miss Green to find Mr Rumball and send him in. Meanwhile he made a bet with himself that the first sex scene in Plonk would be found between pages 15 and 30. He won his bet. It was by no means a certainty. Sometimes this important scene came between pages 1 and 15.
Henry Rumball was a tall, untidy young man on the reportorial staff; his daily round included visits to the docks, the university and the undertakers. He presented himself wordlessly before the editor’s desk.
“I thought you might like to review Plonk,” said Ridley. “I know you take an interest in the modern novel. This is rather special, I believe. Stark stuff. Say what you think, but don’t frighten any old ladies’
“Thanks, Mr Ridley. Gosh, Plonk,” said Rumball, seizing the volume and seeming to caress it.
“You know something about it?”
“I’ve seen the American reviews. They say it moves the novel on to an entirely different plateau of achievement. The Saturday Review man said when he’d finished it he felt exactly as if he had been drinking plonk all night himself. It’s kind of tactile
, I guess.”
“Well, say so in your piece. Tactile is a handy word; tends to make a sentence quotable.”
Rumball rocked his weight from foot to foot, breathed heavily, and then said, “I don’t know that I really ought to do it.”
“Why not? I thought you liked that kind of thing?”
“Yes, Mr Ridley, but I’m trying to keep my head clear, you see. I’m avoiding outside influences, to keep my stream unpolluted, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t know in the least what you mean. What stream are you talking about?”
“My stream of inspiration. For The Plain. My book, you know.”
“Are you writing a book?”
“Yes. Don’t you remember? I told you all about it nearly a year ago.”
“I can’t recall anything about it. When did you tell me?”
“Well, I came in to ask you about a raise—”
“Oh yes, I remember that. I told you to talk to Mr Weir. I never interfere with his staff.”
“Yes, well, I told you then I was writing a novel. And now I’m working on my first draft. And I’m not reading anything, for fear it may influence me. That’s the big danger, you know. Influences. Above all, you have to be yourself.”
“Aha, well if you don’t want Plonk I’ll find someone else. Will you ask Mr Weir to see me when he has a free moment?”
“Could I just talk to you for a minute, about the novel? I’d appreciate your help, Mr Ridley.”
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